The untold story of the rescue mission that could have been NASA's finest hour.

If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.

—Astronaut Gus Grissom, 1965

It is important to note at the outset that Columbia broke up during a phase of flight that, given the current design of the Orbiter, offered no possibility of crew survival.

—Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report

At 10:39 Eastern Standard Time on January 16, 2003, space shuttle Columbia lifted off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A mere 81.7 seconds later, a chunk of insulating foam tore free from the orange external tank and smashed into the leading edge of the orbiter's left wing at a relative velocity of at least 400 miles per hour (640 kph), but Columbia continued to climb toward orbit.

The foam strike was not observed live. Only after the shuttle was orbiting Earth did NASA's launch imagery review reveal that the wing had been hit. Foam strikes during launch were not uncommon events, and shuttle program managers elected not to take on-orbit images of Columbia to visually assess any potential damage. Instead, NASA's Debris Assessment Team mathematically modeled the foam strike but could not reach any definitive conclusions about the state of the shuttle's wing. The mission continued.

In reality, the impact shattered at least one of the crucial reinforced carbon-carbon heat shield panels that lined the edge of the wing, leaving a large hole in the brittle ceramic material. Sixteen days later, as Columbia re-entered the atmosphere, superheated plasma entered the orbiter's structure through the hole in the wing and the shuttle began to disintegrate.

At Mission Control in Houston, the flight controllers monitoring Columbia's descent began to notice erratic telemetry readings coming from the shuttle, and then all voice and data contact with the orbiter was lost. Controllers continued to hope that they were merely looking at instrumentation failures, even as evidence mounted that a catastrophic event had taken place. Finally, at 9:12 Eastern Time, re-entry Flight Director LeRoy Cain gave the terrible order that had only been uttered once before, 17 years earlier when Challenger broke apart at launch: "Lock the doors."

It was an acknowledgement that the worst had happened; the mission was now in "contingency" mode. Mission Control was sealed off, and each flight controller began carefully preserving his or her console's data.

Columbia was gone, and all seven of its crew had been killed. NASA refers to this most rare and catastrophic of events as an LOCV—"Loss of Crew and Vehicle."

Frozen

Columbia is lost. There are no survivors.

—President George W. Bush in a national address, 14:04 EST, February 1, 2003

The world of human space flight paused—first to mourn, then to discover what had happened. Congress laid that responsibility on the combined shoulders of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (referred to, in typical NASA acronym-dependent style, as "the CAIB" or just "CAIB," which rhymes with "Gabe"). In the months after Columbia, the CAIB stretched its investigative fingers all through NASA and its supporting contractors.

My own memories of the time immediately following the accident are dominated by images of somber meetings and frantic work. I was a junior system administrator at Boeing in Houston, and because we supported the shuttle program, we had to locate and send cases and cases of backup tapes—containing everything that happened on every server in our data center during the mission—over to NASA for analysis.

In August 2003, the CAIB issued its final report. Behind the direct cause of the foam strike, the report leveled damning critiques at NASA's pre- and post-launch decision-making, painting a picture of an agency dominated by milestone-obsessed middle management. That focus on narrow, group-specific work and reporting, without a complementary focus on cross-department integration and communication, contributed at least as much to the loss of the shuttle as did the foam impact. Those accusations held a faint echo of familiarity—many of them had been raised 17 years earlier by the Rogers Commission investigating Challenger's destruction.

In the end, Columbia's loss ended not only lives but also careers at all levels of NASA. A number of prominent shuttle program managers were reassigned. It is likely that Columbia's destruction factored heavily into the resignation of NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe. Many involved with the mission—including many still working at NASA—to this day struggle with post-traumatic stress and survivor's guilt. All pending shuttle missions were put on hold, and Columbia's three surviving companion ships—Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour—were grounded.

NASA looked inward, and we wondered if we'd fly again.

A path not taken

To put the decisions made during the flight of STS-107 into perspective, the Board asked NASA to determine if there were options for the safe return of the STS-107 crew.

—Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report

That's the way events actually unfolded. But imagine an alternate timeline for the Columbia mission in which NASA quickly realized just how devastating the foam strike had been. Could the Columbia astronauts have been safely retrieved from orbit?

During the writing of its report, the CAIB had the same question, so it asked NASA to develop a theoretical repair and rescue plan for Columbia "based on the premise that the wing damage events during launch were recognized early during the mission." The result was an absolutely remarkable set of documents, which appear at the end of the report as Appendix D.13. They carry the low-key title "STS-107 In-Flight Options Assessment," but the scenario they outline would have pushed NASA to its absolute limits as it mounted the most dramatic space mission of all time.

NASA planners did have one fortuitous ace in the hole that made the plan possible: while Columbia's STS-107 mission was in progress, Atlantis was already undergoing preparation for flight as STS-114, scheduled for launch on March 1. As Columbia thundered into orbit, the younger shuttle was staged in Orbital Processing Facility 1 (OPF-1) at the Kennedy Space Center. Its three main engines had already been installed, but it didn't yet have a payload or remote manipulator arm in its cargo bay. Two more weeks of refurbishment and prep work remained before it would be wheeled across the space center to the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building and hoisted up for attachment to an external tank and a pair of solid rocket boosters.

Enlarge/Endeavour undergoes processing at OPF-2. Atlantis was in a similar state while Columbia was flying its final mission.

NASA

So an in-orbit rescue was at least feasible—but making a shuttle ready to fly is an incredibly complicated procedure involving millions of discrete steps. In order to pull Atlantis' launch forward, mission planners had to determine which steps if any in the procedure could be safely skipped without endangering the rescue crew.

The desperate race

The scenarios were to assume that a decision to repair or rescue the Columbia crew would be made quickly, with no regard to risk.

—Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report (Appendix D.13)

But even before those decisions could be made, NASA had to make another assessment—how long did it have to mount a rescue? In tallying Columbia's supplies, NASA mission planners realized that the most pressing supply issue for the astronauts wasn't running out of something like air or water but accumulating too much of something: carbon dioxide.

Weight is a precious commodity for spacecraft. Every gram of mass that must be boosted up into orbit must be paid for with fuel, and adding fuel adds weight that must also be paid for in more fuel (this spiral of mass-begets-fuel-begets-mass is often referred to as the tyranny of the rocket equation). Rather than carrying up spare "air," spacecraft launch with a mostly fixed volume of internal air, which they recycle by adding back component gasses. The space shuttle carries supplies of liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen, which are turned into gas and cycled into the cabin's air to maintain a 78 percent nitrogen/21 percent oxygen mixture, similar to Earth's atmosphere. The crew exhales carbon dioxide, though, and that carbon dioxide must be removed from the air.

To do this, the shuttle's air is filtered through canisters filled with lithium hydroxide (LiOH), which attaches to carbon dioxide molecules to form lithium carbonate crystals (Li2CO3), thus sequestering the toxic carbon dioxide. These canisters are limited-use items, each containing a certain quantity of lithium hydroxide; Columbia was equipped with 69 of them.

How long those 69 canisters would last proved difficult to estimate, though, because there isn't a lot of hard data on how much carbon dioxide the human body can tolerate in microgravity. Standard mission operation rules dictate that the mission be aborted if CO2 levels rise above a partial pressure of 15 mmHg (about two percent of the cabin air's volume), and mission planners believed they could stretch Columbia's LiOH canister supply to cover a total of 30 days of mission time without breaking that CO2 threshold. However, doing so would require the crew to spend 12 hours of each day doing as little as possible—sleeping, resting, and doing everything they could to keep their metabolic rates low.

If the crew couldn't sustain that low rate of activity, NASA flight surgeons believed that allowing the CO2 content to rise to a partial pressure of 26.6 mmHg (about 3.5 percent cabin air volume) "would not produce any long-term effects on the health of the crewmembers." This would enable the crew to function on a more "normal" 16-hour/8-hour wake/sleep cycle, but at the cost of potential physiological deficits; headaches, fatigue, and other problems related to the high CO2 levels would have started to manifest very quickly.

After the carbon dioxide scrubbers, the next most limited consumable was oxygen. Columbia's liquid oxygen supplies were used not only to replenish breathing gas for the crew but also to generate power in the shuttle's fuel cells (which combined oxygen with hydrogen to produce both energy and potable water). The amount of liquid oxygen on board could be stretched past the CO2 scrubbers' 30-day mark by drastically cutting down Columbia's power draw.

The remaining three consumable categories consisted of food, water, and propellant. Assuming that the crew would be moving minimally, food and water could stretch well beyond the 30-day limit imposed by the LiOH canisters. To preserve propellant, the orbiter would be placed into an attitude needing minimal fuel to maintain.

Exactly when the crew of Columbia would enact these power- and oxygen-saving measures depended on a short decision tree. In the scenario we're walking through, the assumption is that NASA determined on Flight Day 2 (January 17) that the foam strike had caused some damage, followed by at least another day to gather images of Columbia using "national assets" like ground-based telescopes and other space-based sources (i.e., spy satellites) under the control of USSTRATCOM.

If that imagery positively identified damage, Columbia would immediately enter power-down mode; if the images didn't show anything conclusive, the crew would conduct an EVA (extra-vehicular activity—a spacewalk) to visually assess the damage to the wing, then power things down.

In either case, Flight Day 3 would mark the start of many sleepless nights for many people.

In order to keep the shuttle in the same relative attitude while it orbits, you either must impart is some pitch equal to its orbital period, or you use a "gravity gradient" orientation—you take advantage of the fact that as you get closer to earth, the pull of gravity gets just a teeny bit stronger, and so you orient the tail such that earth's pull on it is enough to impart just the right amount of pitch.

In addition, the Orbiter (once propellant has been expended during ascent) is VERY tail-heavy. This is why the gravity gradient orientation is tail-down, not nose-down.

Columbia's 39 degree orbital inclination could not have been altered to the ISS 51.6 degree inclination without approximately 12,600 ft/sec of translational capability. Columbia had 448 ft/sec of propellant available.

Oh, they couldn't but Sandra Bullock could?

She couldn't either. I heard an interview with the director where he stated that they came up with a reason why the ISS and Hubble where put on the same orbit but it was cut from the final script.

One of the most moving things I've ever seen is the Astronaut Memorial at the Kennedy Space Center. The silent reflection of the sky in the polished granite squares is beautiful and emotionally powerful.

What is a tail mast? I know what a vertical stabilizer is but what is a tail mast?

I second this question - I don't know either.

Also, why downvote someone for asking a question? They want their ignorance remedied with knowledge, thus why they're asking. I hardly see how that's worthy of a downvote.

Yup, wrong terminology on my part. Corrected.

Ha. Might be a case of six of one, half dozen of the other. Tail mast didn't strike me as odd in the article. Might be the wrong terminology, but on the other hand in the vacuum of space the concept of an aerodynamic vertical stabilizer pretty much pointless. Just my two cents.

More to the point this is one of the best articles I've read in years. It's gems such as these that keep me coming back to an otherwise already solid tech site. Thanks you.

Ha. Might be a case of six of one, half dozen of the other. Tail mast didn't strike me as odd in the article. Might be the wrong terminology, but on the other hand in the vacuum of space the concept of an aerodynamic vertical stabilizer pretty much pointless. Just my two cents.

More to the point this is one of the best articles I've read in years. It's gems such as these that keep me coming back to an otherwise already solid tech site. Thanks you.

Thanks I checked the documentation on this one, and "vertical stabilizer" is the correct term; the structure has exactly that role during the glide phase of landing.

It reminds us of how many missed opportunities there were in the Shuttle program.

1) Severe under-funding led to poor design choices, and poor operational choices.2) Lack of a big vision and mission led to a sense of complacency3) Tools / ideas which could have improved survivability were abandoned. This includes the ready rescue shuttle, and the rescue ball

I worked on the planning for the STS-125 rescue mission, STS-400. It took 18 months of planning to develop the procedures, modify the tools, test and simulate the GN&C, EVA, and robotics choreography, and prepare all the paperwork to satisfy everyone that it was a safe plan for both orbiters and the crew. The proposed plan in this article would have been even more difficult because there was no opportunity to use the RMS (robotic arm) to grapple Columbia. Columbia wasn't carrying an arm, and Columbia itself did not have a grapple fixture that Atlantis's arm could use. I am extremely dubious that the manual station keeping would be doable even just from a propellant standpoint: STS-400 had the crew transfer requiring two days. (The STS-400 timeline is available online) For Columbia, that would mean manually station-keeping for an entire EVA (6.5 hours), then separating until the next EVA is ready, and performing another rendezvous and station keeping for > 6.5 hours. I don't think there is anywhere near enough RCS fuel to do that.

The only hope that this plan would have ever had would have been if the plan had already been in place prior to Columbia's launch, as there is no way on this Earth that NASA would have approved a flight with untested procedures that could destroy both orbiters. As I said above, the very similar STS-400 flight planning took 18 months; even if the entire NASA work force worked around the clock, that amount of work wasn't going to happen in just a few weeks. Sadly, I can't see a path where this would have actually been feasible.

"Foam strikes during launch were not uncommon events, and shuttle program managers elected not to take on-orbit images of Columbia to visually assess any potential damage. Instead, NASA's Debris Assessment Team mathematically modeled the foam strike but could not reach any definitive conclusions about the state of the shuttle's wing."

Hindsight is 20/20 they say, but if the models on Earth can't give you a definitive conclusion, then don't just ignore it!v_v

I love your NASA articles Lee.They show just how difficult it is to get someone into space, and safely bring them back. It also tells me that routine and safe space travel will continue to be a part of science fiction for most if not all of my lifetime. If nothing else this story tells me that any new launch system that puts people into orbit needs to consider a good way to recover them if reentry is unfeasible.

We have not given up on our manned space program, we just hitch a ride with the Russians these days. We have not given up on space, we still co-operate the International Space Station, and have missions giving us all sorts of cool information about what's around us.

Space exploration is not dead.

With all due respect, this is a tiny vision.

As far as I can tell, the dream is dead at NASA: We used to talk of bases on the moon - now we hitch a ride to LEO.We used to plan manned missions to Mars and beyond - now only commercial enterprises like Mars One contemplate it.We used to design new rockets, engines and vehicles - now we have SLS which is cobbled together out of old designs, left-over parts, and ideas from the late 1960's.

Where does the dream reside now? Certainly not at NASA.

But it is still breathing at places like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Mars One, and their like. Maybe they can bring us to the next step - as it is clear that NASA hasn't had wind in its sails since 1970.

It's odd, as a submariner, to read stories like this due to the similarities in some of the circumstances of our missions. I often commented when I was still serving that being underway must be rather similar to space. When I read things like this it reminds me that it's really no where close to the risks they faced getting into orbit and then returning home in one piece. I didn't follow the story that closely when this happened, I just knew it was an accident and it was rather sad ( as it always is when these disasters occur). I didn't even know until today that we lost 3 shipmates on that mission.

However, did we not have any other unmanned rockets that we could send up more CO2 scrubbing gear? Or is the problem more one of mating to Columbia when she wasn't prepped for a rendezvous?

From that perspective, nothing could mate with Columbia—she didn't have an external airlock like the other shuttles. Any kind of rendezvous of any craft, manned or unmanned, would have had to approach and keep station, and Columbia's crew would have had to expend consumables suiting up and transferring supplies.

The report notes that because there were no EVAs scheduled for STS-107, none of the crew had had recent EVA training. It would have been risky and complex, and that's even assuming some kind of supply craft could have been found, retasked, and launched in the first place.

However, did we not have any other unmanned rockets that we could send up more CO2 scrubbing gear? Or is the problem more one of mating to Columbia when she wasn't prepped for a rendezvous?

There're several issues: you can't completely change a rocket's flight path and destination without significant changes to it's software, there's no mechanism to stow a payload onto an unmanned vehicle of that time so that it's EVA accessible, and the Columbia crew would have no way to actually get to the vehicle even if it could be brought into a station-keeping position close by.

We have not given up on our manned space program, we just hitch a ride with the Russians these days. We have not given up on space, we still co-operate the International Space Station, and have missions giving us all sorts of cool information about what's around us.

Space exploration is not dead.

With all due respect, this is a tiny vision.

As far as I can tell, the dream is dead at NASA: We used to talk of bases on the moon - now we hitch a ride to LEO.We used to plan manned missions to Mars and beyond - now only commercial enterprises like Mars One contemplate it.We used to design new rockets, engines and vehicles - now we have SLS which is cobbled together out of old designs, left-over parts, and ideas from the late 1960's.

Where does the dream reside now? Certainly not at NASA.

But it is still breathing at places like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Mars One, and their like. Maybe they can bring us to the next step - as it is clear that NASA hasn't had wind in its sails since 1970.

You're placing blame with the wrong agency. NASA has never been the place where the vision begins. NASA is and has always been an implementation agency. We can only do what the White House tells us to do, and what Congress funds us to do. That's where the vision failure lies. Within NASA we feel the same heartache as you as to the direction we're given, but we are bound by law to only do what we are told to do. There's plenty of people within NASA with the will and the knowledge to take us to amazing places. We just can't get anyone to give us a coherent long term strategy to work on.

I worked on the planning for the STS-125 rescue mission, STS-400. It took 18 months of planning to develop the procedures, modify the tools, test and simulate the GN&C, EVA, and robotics choreography, and prepare all the paperwork to satisfy everyone that it was a safe plan for both orbiters and the crew. The proposed plan in this article would have been even more difficult because there was no opportunity to use the RMS (robotic arm) to grapple Columbia. Columbia wasn't carrying an arm, and Columbia itself did not have a grapple fixture that Atlantis's arm could use. I am extremely dubious that the manual station keeping would be doable even just from a propellant standpoint: STS-400 had the crew transfer requiring two days. (The STS-400 timeline is available online) For Columbia, that would mean manually station-keeping for an entire EVA (6.5 hours), then separating until the next EVA is ready, and performing another rendezvous and station keeping for > 6.5 hours. I don't think there is anywhere near enough RCS fuel to do that.

The only hope that this plan would have ever had would have been if the plan had already been in place prior to Columbia's launch, as there is no way on this Earth that NASA would have approved a flight with untested procedures that could destroy both orbiters. As I said above, the very similar STS-400 flight planning took 18 months; even if the entire NASA work force worked around the clock, that amount of work wasn't going to happen in just a few weeks. Sadly, I can't see a path where this would have actually been feasible.

Please not that I'm not picking on you or NASA engineers in particular with this comment. One of the most memorable things about NASA to me was the response to Apollo 13's problem. I'm sure it didn't happen EXACTLY like it did in the movie, but dumping a few boxes of spare parts and equipment on a table and saying "figure it out, failure is not an option" really stuck with me about the NASA's attitude in general. Is that still alive and well? Or was that mostly due to the pressures of the Space race?

Some questions I always had about Columbia: when exactly did the shuttle cabin begin to break apart, and was there any chance -- if the shuttle had been designed for such a task -- of the crew being able to "eject" from the shuttle via some type of emergency escape vehicle? After reading this article, it seems like this would be highly unlikely if not impossible, but I've wondered about such a feature for years; I suppose reading reports about the Challenger crew possibly being alive after the explosion, in a terrifying free fall, and killed on impact with the ocean with do that you.

Absolutely incredible article, Lee. I couldn't look away throughout (and I'll begrudgingly admit that I often lose interest in multi-page Ars articles even when I'm genuinely interested in the topic), and I too welled up as your "story" progressed.

Some questions I always had about Columbia: when exactly did the shuttle cabin begin to break apart, and was there any chance -- if the shuttle had been designed for such a task -- of the crew being able to "eject" from the shuttle via some type of emergency escape vehicle?

It would have taken a vehicle, maybe a capsule, like the ones from Orion. At this speed and at this height, you don't survive without one, even with a parachute.

It reminds me that, after Challenger, it was stated that during Apollo missions, the capsule being on the top of the rocket did allow to safely escape, if the booster exploded. It was obviously not the case with challenger, where pressure and heat blowed everything around them.

Please not that I'm not picking on you or NASA engineers in particular with this comment. One of the most memorable things about NASA to me was the response to Apollo 13's problem. I'm sure it didn't happen EXACTLY like it did in the movie, but dumping a few boxes of spare parts and equipment on a table and saying "figure it out, failure is not an option" really stuck with me about the NASA's attitude in general. Is that still alive and well? Or was that mostly due to the pressures of the Space race?

It's OK, no offense taken. There was a great deal of internal debate after Columbia about exactly this. The safety culture within NASA had definitely deteriorated, even with the Challenger lessons, to where management just assumed everything was going to be OK because it had always been OK. The Columbia report doesn't hold any punches regarding the failures of NASA management to act when the engineers raised concerns, and about the culture that made the engineers afraid to voice their concerns more strongly to begin with. At the time of Columbia, NASA just didn't want to hear that there could be a problem.

Today, things are quite different. Columbia forced a huge and effective change in the safety culture. Many of the managers who were problems in the past were "promoted" to positions out of the critical path. I think that if an emergency were to arise today, the response would be more like the Apollo 13 "just fix it" approach.

Some questions I always had about Columbia: when exactly did the shuttle cabin begin to break apart, and was there any chance -- if the shuttle had been designed for such a task -- of the crew being able to "eject" from the shuttle via some type of emergency escape vehicle? After reading this article, it seems like this would be highly unlikely if not impossible, but I've wondered about such a feature for years; I suppose reading reports about the Challenger crew possibly being alive after the explosion, in a terrifying free fall, and killed on impact with the ocean with do that you.

There is an entire chapter of the report dedicated to providing a detailed answer to your questions. Rather than rehashing, I'd suggest reading it directly.

The short answer, though, is this:

Quote:

Post-accident analysis of flight data that was generated after telemetry information was lost showed another abrupt change in the Orbiterʼs aerodynamics caused by a continued progression of left wing damage at EI+917. The data showed a significant increase in positive roll and negative yaw, again indicating another increase in drag on and lift from the damaged left wing. Columbiaʼs flight control sys- tem attempted to compensate for this increased left yaw by firing all four right yaw jets. Even with all thrusters firing, combined with a maximum rate of change of aileron trim, the flight control system was unable to control the left yaw, and control of the Orbiter was lost at EI+970 seconds. Mission Control lost all telemetry data from the Orbiter at EI+923 (8:59:32 a.m.). Civilian and military video cameras on the ground documented the final breakup. The Modular Auxil- iary Data System stopped recording at EI+970 seconds.

...

The load and heat rate calculations are shown for the crew module along its reconstructed trajectory. The band superimposed on the trajectory (starting about 9:00:58 a.m. EST) represents the window where all the evaluated debris originated. It appears that the destruction of the crew module took place over a period of 24 seconds beginning at an altitude of approximately 140,000 feet and ending at 105,000 feet. These figures are consistent with the results of independent thermal re-entry and aerodynamic models. The debris footprint proved consistent with the results of these trajectory analyses and models. Approximately 40 to 50 percent, by weight, of the crew module was recovered.

...

Videos of the crew during re-entry that have been made public demonstrate that prescribed procedures for use of equipment such as full-pressure suits, gloves, and helmets were not strictly followed. This is confirmed by the Working Groupʼs conclusions that three crew members were not wearing gloves, and one was not wearing a helmet. However, under these circumstances, this did not affect their chances of survival.

EI = "entry interface" and refers to the moment the shuttle crosses the imaginary line at 400,000 ft. that marks the "top" of the atmosphere.

Please not that I'm not picking on you or NASA engineers in particular with this comment. One of the most memorable things about NASA to me was the response to Apollo 13's problem. I'm sure it didn't happen EXACTLY like it did in the movie, but dumping a few boxes of spare parts and equipment on a table and saying "figure it out, failure is not an option" really stuck with me about the NASA's attitude in general. Is that still alive and well? Or was that mostly due to the pressures of the Space race?

It's OK, no offense taken. There was a great deal of internal debate after Columbia about exactly this. The safety culture within NASA had definitely deteriorated, even with the Challenger lessons, to where management just assumed everything was going to be OK because it had always been OK. The Columbia report doesn't hold any punches regarding the failures of NASA management to act when the engineers raised concerns, and about the culture that made the engineers afraid to voice their concerns more strongly to begin with. At the time of Columbia, NASA just didn't want to hear that there could be a problem.

Today, things are quite different. Columbia forced a huge and effective change in the safety culture. Many of the managers who were problems in the past were "promoted" to positions out of the critical path. I think that if an emergency were to arise today, the response would be more like the Apollo 13 "just fix it" approach.

No, I logged in just to say thank you to the author. I couldn't imagine this would have taken a reasonable time to write. The stress and emotion would have me tearing at the end of each section.

Space has claimed relatively few of those it could, We have been careful, and the self selection of people willing to go is of the order of "I have to be okay with dying on this mission, but if I do then those like me might never go again so am I good enough to not die when great isn't good enough? Am I good enough to prevent the death of a million childhood dreams?" Armstrong was not the best human being to ever go into space. That is not an insult to the man, that is praise to the lessons that NASA has learned about humanity. While the likes of Christa McAuliffe have failed their mission of keeping space accessible, they are the best examples of the best of human kind. Willing to die for pushing us forward, and doing everything in their power to make sure they don't.

Now I'm going back to finish reading Hadfield's book. With a teary eye.

As far as I can tell, the dream is dead at NASA: We used to talk of bases on the moon - now we hitch a ride to LEO.

Bases on the moon? You mean like this one or this one? Remember, NASA's never built its own hardware (well, mostly); it's always relied on industrial contractors to construct what it uses, and even to come up with new ideas to explore in the first place (don't believe me, you can go back to 1960s-era studies and count how many of them are Boeing, Bellcomm, etc. and how many are internal NASA).

We used to design new rockets, engines and vehicles - now we have SLS which is cobbled together out of old designs, left-over parts, and ideas from the late 1960's.

More accurately, the 1970s; the idea of the in-line shuttle-derived heavy-lift launch vehicle, not to mention all the designs actually intended to be used on SLS (except for the RL-10 in its upper stage) date from them. But what's wrong with using existing, proven rockets? The RS-25 (aka the SSME) is one of the best rocket engines ever built, very close to the theoretical limit of performance for engines of its type; is there something wrong with not dropping it for the new shiny? Especially when all rocket engines show a rather distinct tendency to fail much less often the more they're used (and hence kinks are worked out). Aerospace engineering is not like computing, you don't get exponential improvement in performance, there are limited options to make big leaps forwards. An old design can be just as good or better than a new design.

- did or did not NASA try to review the images of the foam impact ?- did or did not NASA hush the engineers who saw the foam impacts ?- did or did not NASA consider rescuing the Columbia crew ?

1) NASA always reviewed shuttle launch images after the shuttle reached orbit. In this case, the imagery analysis showed that a foam strike happened, but did not show much more than that. The actual "pictures" are a few blurry frames. NASA managers chose not to take further pictures of Columbia in orbit, even though USSTRATCOM proactively volunteered to get the images ready after being unofficially informed that a strike had taken place. The CAIB report contains documentation showing that NASA politely rebuffed USSTRATCOM for being proactive and asked them to stay within official channels:

Quote:

Later, a NASA liaison to USSTRATCOM sent an e-mail thanking personnel for the prompt response to the imagery request. The e-mail asked that they help NASA observe “official channels” for this type of support in the future.

2) NASA didn't "hush" anyone. However, the report calls out NASA for not loosening lines of communication between different engineering groups and not allowing more communication to flow up from engineering to management. It could be said—and the report supports this—that the engineers who thought there was a problem weren't encouraged to speak in a loud enough voice to be heard.

3) No. The danger to Columbia was never officially recognized. The plan presented here was developed after, specifically in response to the accident investigation board's question about what a rescue mission would have looked like.

We have not given up on our manned space program, we just hitch a ride with the Russians these days. We have not given up on space, we still co-operate the International Space Station, and have missions giving us all sorts of cool information about what's around us.

Space exploration is not dead.

With all due respect, this is a tiny vision.

As far as I can tell, the dream is dead at NASA: We used to talk of bases on the moon - now we hitch a ride to LEO.We used to plan manned missions to Mars and beyond - now only commercial enterprises like Mars One contemplate it.We used to design new rockets, engines and vehicles - now we have SLS which is cobbled together out of old designs, left-over parts, and ideas from the late 1960's.

Where does the dream reside now? Certainly not at NASA.

But it is still breathing at places like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Mars One, and their like. Maybe they can bring us to the next step - as it is clear that NASA hasn't had wind in its sails since 1970.

No insult taken, and I respectfully disagree.

NASA is still pushing new technologies - they have successfully tested a 3D printed fuel injector, which brings the cost of that part down significantly. NASA still has the institutional knowledge to do whatever they need to, provided Congress and the White House give them the long term goal and resources to execute.

I don't think that private contractors actually moving things into space necessarily excludes NASA, though. It seems to me that NASA could develop new spacefaring technologies, and then have the contractors actually use them, or vice versa. This isn't a zero-sum game.

Are you writing this as an independent, impartial journalist, or are you still in some way connected with NASA or the survivors? Talking about the psychological aspects of what went on seems entirely appropriate for a piece of popular tech journalism that talks about the disaster. After all, were you an engineer involved with it? Yet, you are not averse to talking about the technical aspects of it. I expect journalists to do their job, not act as agency stenographers.

I worked for Boeing from 2001-2010; my wife still works there. We both did shuttle program support, but no, I'm not and have never been a civil servant or direct NASA contractor; nor has my wife.

The reason why it's taken me seven months to write this piece is because there is a tremendous reticence within the agency to actually talk about the accident with journalists; my original plan did indeed have a very wide scope and involved lots of interviews. None of those interviews, though, led to even a single sentence of on-record information; the only official response I received was a polite but firm "no" from NASA's Public Affairs Office.

I'm more comfortable talking about the technical aspects of the proposed rescue mission because they're technical, and I'm not a trained journalist—I'm an IT guy. The technology makes sense. To go beyond the CAIB report's analysis of decision making would have required a whole lot of journalism, and it would have been very difficult to do because none of the folks involved would speak on record. The next steps would have been ferreting out former NASA contractors (like former USA employees in Florida) and other folks who had a direct hand in shuttle operations, but again, that wall against talking to journalists would be difficult to breach.

Ultimately, I decided that the best way to approach the story for a site like Ars was to focus on the rescue mission and the technology and flow, rather than the Columbia accident itself. The rescue was the story I really wanted to tell, and digging back into the accident is something that would require a better journalist than me.

And, besides...it would take a lot to do a better job than the CAIB report did. It's not a NASA self-promotional document—the CAIB was an independent board and the document is in fact extremely critical of the agency. I know I keep saying this, but if you want to really read a critique of NASA's decision-making, read the report.

Lee - you are incorrect on one point - you are a journalist. This excellent piece proves it.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.